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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Saturn V who wrote (93364)	2/15/2000 6:21:00 PM
From: kash johal	Respond to of 1571686

Saturn, Yup integer takes 1 cycle and FPU 3. AMD essentially tripled the number of FPU execution units to beget the AThlon. But i think in lots of "real world" apps the number of integer instructions far exceed FP instructions - except in a gaming type of environment. Intel is ruuning the integer at 2x FPU speed to kick butt on general windows type stuff. We still don't know how many FPU execution units they have. If they have 6 lets say then you may have a true kick ass machine. Of course the die size would be huge!!! Based on what little we know willy seems a winner. regards, Kash

To: Saturn V who wrote (93364)	2/15/2000 6:36:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 1571686

Saturn, <I see more sense in running FPU rather than the integer unit at 2X clock rate.> So do I. Maybe Willamette reduced the integer part down to one or two execution units, and used the extra space for floating-point. I do know that for floating-point, there is much more of an opportunity to run several operations in parallel. (This is how the Emotion engine in Sony's Playstation 2 achieves its impressive floating-point performance.) But for integer, perhaps data hazards are preventing higher IPC (instructions per cycle) than anything else. That, combined with the relative simplicity of integer logic, made the integer unit a prime candidate for running at 2x the clock rate. This is all wild speculation, as usual. Tenchusatsu